Month: July 2015

I turned down offers from 3 large healthcare systems to become their Chief Medical Informatics Officer and walked away from a blossoming health tech startup that I had founded to return to life in clinical medicine. I reached this difficult decision just over a year ago. Before that, I was spending most of my waking hours writing code with one foot in San Francisco and the other in NYC. The differences between startups and hospitals are dramatic and have their roots in organization (or lack thereof).

1. If hospitals were run like startups, electronic medical records such as Cerner’s Powerchart and eClinical Works would be laughed at, not adopted.

(I recently counted how many mouse clicks it takes to write a patient note in Cerner’s Powerchart. Each “progress note,” of which physicians can write two dozen or more each day, takes about 250 mouse clicks to navigate (not including the textual content of the note!). A “history and physical” takes about 350 clicks to document — this again does not include the actual textual content of the note, just navigating awkward menus.

2. If hospitals were run like startups, they wouldn’t adopt software so poorly designed and non-intuitive that it takes months to train people how to use it.

Can you imagine holding a week-long training course to teach employees how to use an iPhone, hiring a team of full-time employees to “support” these captive users, and constantly reinforce how to use tragically chosen hardware and software?

3. If hospitals were run like startups, there would be transparency in how organizations operate and how decisions are made.

Scrum would be the name of the game, and yes, even the Scrum Master can be overthrown as spectacularly as the most entrenched Middle Eastern dictator.

I speak from personal experience both as a startup guy selling hospitals software, and now as a hospital employee, when I say that politics frequently predominate an organization’s decision to purchase particular enterprise software. “IT committees” don’t choose the best piece of software for the job; much of this decision-making is based on kick-backs and sales that lead directly or indirectly to an individual(s) gains.

(The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.)

4. If hospitals were run like startups, decisions regarding the implementation of technology in the workplace would be made by experts and thought leaders.

Instead, this critical task is relegated to IT committees headed by retired nurses and physicians with little to no grasp of how modern web and mobile technology works.

5. If hospitals were run like startups, no one would hesitate to invest in sound software and hardware because this is the highest-yield investment an organization can make in the year 2015.

6. If hospitals were run like startups, they wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for enterprise software only to realize a few months later that it doesn’t run on any of the hospital computers.

(Yes, I’ve seen this happen. Seriously.)

7. If hospitals were run like startups, personal merit, not seniority, would determine who is allowed to call shots.

8. If hospitals were run like startups, machines would run Unix-based operating systems.

Many hospital PCs have not been upgraded in decades and still run Windows XP (or older versions of Windows).

Yes, I’m serious.

(why Google when you can call the Operator?)

9. If hospitals were run like startups, they would nourish and celebrate innovation from its employees.

Large companies like Google and small startups alike give their employees ample time to learn new technologies and cultivate side projects.

Realizing how inefficient one hospital’s current paging system is, I started writing a web app while working the night shift to make this process more efficient. In that particular hospital, nurses randomly page one of the on-call MDs at night, ask if they are responsible for patient John Doe, and hope that they reached the correct physician. The page consists of a 4-digit “callback” number that gives no information on how emergent or non-urgent the call is (which is important in hospitals, as you can imagine). Making things more interesting, the hospital contains many “black holes,” such as the emergency department, where pages can’t be received, and critical pages can disappear into cyberspace.

Our app lets users look up a room number and send a prioritized, SMS-based message within seconds. The recipient can then acknowledge receipt of the message or respond via SMS (which is not possible with the current antiquated pager system). Building the app was the easy part. Our physician, pharmacist and nursing colleagues were thrilled to start using it, but we were asked to get formal approval from the “IT Committee” before using it. The app was 100% HIPAA complaint, in fact more HIPAA compliant than the hospital’s legacy Windows PCs running versions of IE that predate Javascript. It took months to get a meeting set up, and 15 minutes for the IT committee to shoot it down.

One of my physician-coder friends makes a living running a gaming website. He avoids healthcare like the bubonic plague. Now I understand why.

10. If hospitals were run like startups, they would use their resources to do more inspiring things than set up firewalls and encrypt hard disks.

“IT” in most hospitals is synonymous with internet security. What about apps that engage patients, monitor patients with chronic illness at home using wearable technology and apps, help patients engage with physicians, and help healthcare professionals do their work more efficiently — so they can spend more time doing the most important, and enjoyable, part of their work: listening to their patients?

I’ve come across a small handful of physician-coders since moving to San Francisco. There aren’t many of us. We are idealists. We love the practice of medicine. We are deeply frustrated that hospitals are run more inefficiently than the most poorly run post offices. We can build things and are effervescing with ideas and enthusiasm.

Our battle with uninspired hospital administrators constipating the flow of innovation may be perpetual. So should our hunger to re-invent this industry.